The multiple faces of tension: dualities in decision-making

In making decisions about strategic and operational actions, managers commonly need to consider dualities such as long-term versus short-term, innovation versus tradition, and stability versus change. As these dualities often entail contradictory objectives, paradoxical tensions may arise in their pursuit. Despite growing interest in this topic, the extant literature offers little guidance on how paradoxical framing can be used to understand these tensions. To address this gap, a qualitative study of 18 marketing managers in the Austrian traditional beverage industry investigated how managers interpret and assess such tensions by deploying paradoxical cognitive frames. Our findings suggest that these managers confront duality-type decisions under three categories: identity ambiguity, renewal dynamics and competing coalitions. In addition, we find that marketing managers perceive such tensions as either vicious, virtuous, dialectical, ambivalent or neutral. The present study contributes to the literature by empirically addressing context-specific dualities in a traditional industry that involves marketing and innovation activities. The findings also extend our knowledge of duality-related paradoxical tensions and their particular managerial framing.